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In Latin America and the Caribbean, research is mainly publicly funded. However, access to the results of that research is hampered by limitations in traditional scholarly communication systems.

CLACSO-Latin American Council of Social Sciences, a non-governmental network of 542 research institutions and 650 postgraduate programs in 41 countries, partners with universities and governments of Latin America and the Caribbean in the promotion and development of strategies and initiatives that provide open access to research results in the region.

CLACSO works together with the regional initiatives Latindex, Redalyc, SciELO, La Referencia,UNESCO-GOAP, and with institutional repositories and university journal portals, to give visibility to research output from the region. All these initiatives are non-commercial and managed by the scholarly community.

The Council renews its support to those non-commercial institutional and regional scholarly initiatives mentioned above to give visibility and open access to research output from Latin America and the Caribbean, and hopes that governments in the region will continue giving their full support to strengthen these initiatives.

In a region where open access initiatives mentioned above are managed by the scholarly community, the Council sees with great concern proposals from international commercial publishers to manage open access of Latin American journals.

In 2013 INASP is encouraging our partner and network countries to use Open Access Week to showcase the activities that universities and research institutions within developing and emerging countries are planning and doing. Your activities might include:

creating greater understanding of Open Access or the Open Access movement

increasing wider awareness and use of institutional repositories

promoting and providing training in Open Access resources

showcasing the open source software being used

using the opportunities provided by Open Access policies to create, share and improve access to information and electronic resources

having fun with your own competitions or displays

The above may be undertaken through library or faculty displays, training sessions, or producing materials/resources to share information about your activities — or other innovative ways you have found to reach research, faculty and library colleagues (such as social networking sites).

We are aware that finding budget to produce materials to promote Open Access and your own activities can be difficult, so INASP is hosting a competition that will provide winners with $500 to contribute towards these costs. There are 10 prizes to be won and the winners will also have the opportunity to share their Open Access activities with the INASP network through our websites and publications. All applicants may also usewww.openaccessweek.org to share ideas and get feedback.